Doomsdays

Though each of these scenarios could happen, most scientists think a snowball effect of multiple events is more likely, Miller said. For instance, global warming could increase the prevalence of pathogens while also causing widespread shifts in climate. Meanwhile, ecosystem collapse could make it slightly harder to produce food, with no bees to pollinate crops or trees to filter agricultural water. So, instead of an epic catastrophe, several relatively small factors would slightly worsen life on Earth until it gradually degraded, Miller said.

In that scenario, the downfall of Earth is not dramatic, "like being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger," Miller told LiveScience. "It's more like being nibbled to death by ducks."

There is too much binary thinking with this and everything else. We're not doomed right now but it could happen any moment. This is nothing but secularized Jesusthink.

Pathogens, starvation, war, and freakish weather already take plenty of lives on a regular basis. Doom is a constant in life as it is but all dooms are just a matter of degree and extent.

For modern individualism-trained brains however, a special property comes into play which is the proximity of a given doom in question. Did the doom affect me? If yes, it was a doom. If no, it wasn't a doom.

Yep - doomsday was yesterday, today and tomorrow. The terrible and awesome scourge

I find it very funny that collective humanity seems to have some odd fascination with the famed 'end of the world'. Every time there's some oddball theory floating about, it's all over the news (2012 mayan 'apocalypse', Y2K, Harold Camping etc.)

In the civil religions of the modern world, the future functions as a surrogate for heaven and hell alike, the place where the wicked will finally get the walloping they deserve and the good will be granted the promised benefits that the present never quite gets around to providing them. What Nietzsche called the death of God—in less colorful language, the fading out of living religious belief as a significant force in public life—left people across the Western world flailing for something to backstop the sense of moral order in the cosmos they once derived from religious faith.

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The difficulty with a morphological approach to history is precisely that a sample size of more than one turns up patterns that next to nobody in the modern industrial world wants to think about. By placing past civilizations side by side with that of the modern industrial West, Spengler found that all the great historical changes that our society sees as uniquely its own have exact equivalents in older societies. Each society emerges out of chaos as a decentralized feudal society, with a warrior aristocracy and an epic poetry so similar that an enterprising bard could have recited the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh in an Anglo-Saxon meadhall without anyone present sensing the least incongruity. Each then experiences corresponding shifts in social organization: the meadhalls and their equivalents give way to castles, the castles to fortified towns, the towns to cities, and then a few of the cities outgrow all the others and become the centers in which the last stages of the society’s creative life are worked out.

I find it very funny that collective humanity seems to have some odd fascination with the famed 'end of the world'. Every time there's some oddball theory floating about, it's all over the news (2012 mayan 'apocalypse', Y2K, Harold Camping etc.)